Three years ago, when Christian Hernandez was 16 years old, he recorded a joke voicemail greeting. It starts off with, “Hello. Hey! Uh, can’t understand you.” It’s meant to trick the caller into thinking it’s Hernandez on the phone. Eventually, callers hear, “Ha, voicemail! You know what to do, stupid.”

Now, at 19, Hernandez is looking for a job. And the greeting which started off as a joke for friends could be a liability.

Teen unemployment is at 24.4 percent, three times the national average. With opportunities for young job seekers so scarce, it’s more important than ever that they think about all the little things that could hurt their chances, like a voicemail greeting calling potential employers “stupid.”

With only two weeks left before summer break, I visited Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., to talk with teens about summer employment. As the bell rang at 3:05, signaling the end of the school day, most teens rushed for the door, but sophomores Marina Wright and Ivan Johnson stayed behind. Both were desperate for work and say they applied everywhere. Wright got lucky, landing her first job at a youth development center. Johnson says he was close with a city parks position, but was turned down at the end of the hiring process because he wasn’t yet 16.

Early in the interview, my producer asked them if they knew what “soft skills” are. “How many words you can type per minute?” guessed Wright. Johnson asked if soft skills had something to do with grammar. I didn’t even know what they were, but soft skills like professional etiquette and follow-through are the first things many employers say they look for in a candidate.

Wright explained that her peers get professional etiquette wrong all the time. “Their email will be inappropriate,” she said, “like big-booty-something at gmail.com.”

“My email is kind of inappropriate,” admitted Johnson. “It’s ipacmanjohnson. My mom is like, ‘Dude, what are you doing making that email?’“ At 8 years old, Johnson’s favorite game was Pac-Man, and iPhones were really popular, so he attached the “i” from iPhone to Pacman and put his last name at the end. Professionalism was the last thing on his mind when he created the email address, but now that he’s 15 and looking for a job, he basically has to rebrand himself for an unfamiliar world.

“Yeah, I gotta make a new one,” said Johnson, “cause you need to grow out of it. You need to show that you can be mature and be presentable.”

When it comes to being presentable, employers say teens often miss the mark in interviews, mistaking clothes they’d wear to the club for professional attire, or going in showing off their tattoos and piercings. Career Counselor Marty Nemko recommends dressing “one notch higher than you would on the job, if you got hired.” He says if you don’t know what to wear, just call and ask.

Much of interviewing, is obvious, said Nemko. “You leave your monotone home, you go and ask questions, you lean forward, you’ve got a smile on your face. You nod.” But, he added, not everything is so simple, like finding the right balance between confident and cocky.

“As capable as any 17- or 18-year-old is, there really are a few things one could learn,” said Nemko, “but you also don't want to be a little wimp and sound desperate. ‘I'll take anything, I'll do anything.’”

Back at Skyline High School, Ivan Johnson says he would love to land an interview, but it’s also what freaks him out the most because he doesn’t know what questions employers will ask. Marina Wright worries that she’ll take too long to answer a question or stutter or mumble her words.

Nemko’s solution to both of these problems is simple preparation. One way to prepare is to go in knowing a little bit about the company. He also recommends having a couple of what he calls “PAR” stories, which detail a problem you faced, how you approached it, and the positive result.

“For example,” said Nemko, “let’s say in your school, they were doing a fundraiser to pay for the school play,” and it was your idea to have the actors perform scenes on the street. “Thats clever,” he said, “and you can say, ‘We raised 700 dollars as a result of it.’ You stated the problem, how you approached it, and the positive result.” Nemko says these kinds of stories are often very impressive to employers.

Sixteen-year-old Wright says her peers aren’t quite living up to that ideal. Many are so afraid to talk to employers that they list their parents’ contact information instead of their own on job applications.

]]>Thu, 20 Jun 2013 19:31:19 GMTJobstacles: Is it possible to have too many jobs?http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/jobstacles-it-possible-have-too-many-jobs

Drake Elliot says it’s not so bad being a pizza delivery driver. The salary is $8 an hour plus tips, and the job comes with a few perks.

“You’re above a civilian slightly," says Elliot. "Like, I can double-park in the middle of the street, hold up my pizza bag and be like, ‘It’s okay ma’am, I’m a pizza delivery driver. I’m just doing my job.'"

Though only 20-years-old, the Santa Barbara, Calif. community college student has already had his fair share of jobs. “I’ve been an administrative assistant. I’ve worked as an intern at a graphic design company. I’ve been a janitor. I’ve been a counselor at a skateboard camp. I’ve worked as a painter. I’ve worked doing carpentry."

And that’s not even counting the jobs that Elliot doesn’t put on his resume, like when he tried laying tiles for a home remodel.

"I had absolutely no idea what I was doing,” Elliot recalls. He broke half of the tiles in the home and was fired the same day.

With so few jobs available to people his age, Elliot says he'll try anything. Ultimately, he wants to be a therapist, but in the meantime, he’s just trying to build skills and figure out what he’s good at. Occasional failure? It’s actually part of his plan.

Bonnie Bell, a career coach in Oakland, Calif., says, “I think it could be a very good strategy for some people to just try a whole bunch of stuff and see what works.” Bell says it’s not necessarily a red flag to have lots of short-term jobs on your resume. “It could be a conglomerate of experience that you get two weeks here, two weeks there. Somebody could brag about, in an interview eventually, I’ve had 12 jobs and out of that I’ve found ...”

It’s all about what they learn from their experience, says Bell. Young people have to turn their job history into a narrative that makes sense. So after 10 different jobs, what can you say you’ve learned?

Ben Knudtson had the opposite problem last summer. He had just graduated high school and had zero job experience. Playing guitar wasn’t paying the bills, so he applied to coffee shops, record stores, retail — basically anything. Knudtson kept striking out, until he saw a flyer.

So he called and two days later, he got a job canvassing, or fundraising on the street. But Knudtson says, most people walking down the street didn’t have the time or inclination to stop and talk. Canvassers face constant rejection while trying to meet a daily quota to keep their jobs. Knudtson lasted a month before quitting. According to one sociologist’s study, most canvassers only survive two weeks.

Canvassing is one of the few jobs teens can get that doesn’t require previous experience. But is such a short term job really worth it?

“Two weeks of that experience is much better than two weeks of doing nothing,” Bell says. “You have to learn to think on your feet. You have to engage people.”

Those skills that are essential to any job. Knudtson says the canvassing job wasn’t a total waste, he made a couple hundred bucks and put it on his resume … emphasizing the customer service and people skills he acquired.

A year later, Knudtson has three jobs he likes better than canvassing — one even lets him explore his passion for guitar rock at a music magazine.

This story is part of our series Jobstacles, from Youth Radio's New Options Desk, which reports on young adults finding work.

Seventeen-year-old Andrew is filling out a job application for a Jamba Juice in Oakland, Calif. He’s making his way through the basics, filling out his name and contact information. However, question five posed a challenge. It was a yes or no checkbox which read, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

“I will check yes,” said Andrew, who requested anonymity for this story. When he was 14, a high school freshman, he took a gun to school. It is a shocking act for many, especially in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, but Andrew says he did it to be cool. Three years later, he is haunted by that decision.

In the space below the checkbox where it asks for specifics, Andrew scrawled “weapon charges.” It’s pretty easy to imagine what an employer would think reading those two words. Little did Andrew know, they are words he could have kept to himself. In California, and many other states, young people who are processed through the juvenile court system, are never “convicted.” Instead, they are “adjudicated.”

Rachel Johnson-Farias, a lawyer at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, said that adjudication is basically a fancy word for when a court finds allegations to be true. Johnson-Farias explained that while the difference between "adjudication" and "conviction" is slight, it matters when filling out job applications. When asked if you’ve been convicted of a crime, “If you don't have any adult convictions, you can say ‘no’,” said Johnson-Farias.

However, in some states, like Iowa, juvenile records are public, meaning that juvenile offenders should check “yes.” And even in California it could be a “yes,” if the application asks about arrests instead of convictions. Confused yet? Many places have eliminated this type of checkbox altogether with laws called Ban the Box.

“Essentially, it forbids employers asking about a person’s criminal record,” explained Newark, New Jersey City Council Member Ronald Rice. He wrote the city’s Ban the Box law, which prevents employers from asking about records until after they make a tentative job offer. Forty-three cities and counties and seven states have passed similar laws. Newark’s is the most sweeping.

A study in the journal Pediatrics finds that nearly a third of adults in this country have been arrested by age 23, and Rice argues that pre-screening applicants for criminal history creates a permanent underclass. “Continually penalizing people (without giving) them the opportunity to apply for work,” said Rice, “is really anti-American, but it’s also anti-business.” Anti-business because the whole economy suffers when people can’t find jobs, argued Councilmember Rice.

But imagine you’re an employer who learns at the very end of a hiring process that your top candidate committed rape or murder. “You look at that,” said George Allen from the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, “And you’re like, 'Oh my gosh could this be safe for my customers, or in some cases for my employees?'”

The Seattle Chamber of Commerce opposed early drafts of a citywide Ban the Box proposal, because of costs and risks. For example, what if an employer rescinded a job offer after learning about an applicant’s criminal record? Allen said, “That applicant could turn around and sue the employer for unlimited emotional distress, and we just felt that that was too heavy a hammer.”

After meeting with resistance, Seattle lawmakers released a new Ban the Box proposal, which Allen said strikes a better balance. If the law goes through, Seattle employers will have more control, and applicants with criminal records might have a better chance at starting over.

In Oakland, 17-year-old Andrew says it’s all about redemption.

“That never was really me,” said Andrew, “You can’t really hold a person’s past against them because the person could be different."

Recognizing people’s capacity for change may have something to do with why lawmakers in eight more states -- from California to New Jersey -- are considering statewide Ban the Box laws, trying to figure out how much a person’s past should affect their future.